X-teams brush aside the engagement huggers

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

With Melcrum’s employee engagement conference only days away the media has been busily discussing an issue that is increasingly being viewed as core to the operating income and the overall bottom line of global businesses. In the last week alone articles have appeared in Business Week, while an entire supplement is dedicated to management, engagement and business schools in today’s Financial Times. And it’s within these salmon pink pages that I spotted a rather interesting series of viewpoints by Deborah Ancona, faculty director of MIT’s Leadership Centre in the US.

She’s young, wears hip specs and talks about tearing up the manual rather a lot. Too much for some perhaps but she does make one very clear and very interesting point as we approach Melcrum’s eagerly awaited conference: that engaged and subsequently high performing teams are externally rather than internally focused.

She calls these groups, X-teams, a concept she helped develop and that describes externally orientated teams that drive innovation within organisations. Countering the traditional academic models of what makes effective teams - clear goals and roles, cohesiveness and team spirit - she spent a large amount of time with companies in the 1980s, attending internal meetings and going on sales calls, and determined that the old way of thinking was complete codswallop.

Prof Ancona concluded that externally focused teams were far more motivated, establish co-operative relationships with stakeholders and customers, seek out information from other teams and outside sources, and pursue support from senior management. Sounds like the majority of the most successful internal communications teams we know and love here at Melcrum and which feature in the thousands of case studies we have at our members’ disposal.

Her ideas have been and still are being met with resistance from classically versed engagement ‘experts’, however she insists her case is particularly strong when you consider the current financial crisis the world and its large corporates are currently facing. “In a crisis people are rigid and unable to act,” she tells the FT. “X-teams see the big picture,” she adds.

Prof Ancona also dispels traditional methods of team building and suggests that to create and maintain high levels of engagement companies should, rather than go on outward bound courses and constantly hug one another, break out into sub-groups and talk to customers, stakeholders and competitors and, in her own words, “bond around what is going on in your environment”.

As communicators can you relate to these sentiments? Do you agree with Prof Ancona and her X-teams? If so and if you are in or lead an X-team please let us know either by replying to this post or by emailing me at james.bennett@melcrum.com

High performing X-teams:

• More motivated and more successful as a result
• Establish co-operative relationships with stakeholders and customers
• Seek out information from other teams and outside sources
• Pursue support from senior management
• Come in on budget and on schedule
• Receive better client ratings from top management
• See the big picture and are free to react
• Have their pulse on what is going on in the environment
• Can effectively find new ways to cut costs and new ways to generate revenue
• Can originate new ideas for new technologies
• Are more attuned to what the customer or stakeholder wants

Poor performing teams:

• Inward looking
• Internally focused
• Build a wall between themselves and the world
• Have no effective interaction with their environment
• Over time become unhappy
• Rigid and fail to see the big picture

Comments

[Jill Wedge]

Thanks James really useful article. We read it at the Melcrum online writing workshop. You were critiqued by eight budding bloggers!
Jill Wedge